Xinjiang - de nieuwe grens van China

Jeanne Boden

Uitgeverij ASP

ISBN 978 90 5487 774 5

(English)

Buy direct from ASP or bruna

The Chinese province of Xinjiang is an area as large as Great Britain, France, Spain and Germany combined, yet still to many of us a blind spot. It is one of the areas on earth furthest away from the sea. Xinjiang borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It has the statute of ‘Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’ and is under the control of the central Chinese government. Not only the position of Xinjiang, bordering Central Asia and Russia, but also the deserts full of oil and gas make Xinjiang a strategic area for China.

In 1978 China opened its doors to foreign investment, resulting in rocket-speed economic development of the country. Economic development was also the start of a gigantic migration of China’s population, affecting and changing many areas in China and leading to rapid urbanization.

Since the end of the 1990s the central government decided to also develop the west: Tibet and Xinjiang. Roads and railroads have been built connecting this remote area to the rest of China. Most of the inhabitants of Xinjiang are happy with that. But economic development has a flipside. It puts pressure on the ethnic groups in the area.

The region is historically explosive. Media coverage is usually limited to bombing or ethnic clashes. Ethnical tensions are not limited to a bipolar clash between Uyghur and Han-Chinese. They result from a complexity of factors.

This book highlights the complexity of an area where Han-Chinese, Kazakh, Uyghur, Mongol, and many other ethnic groups search for equilibrium and identity and where the policy of the central Chinese government sometimes has surprising local consequences.

––